Aerohive's equity financing exploits market

Aerohive Networks has announced $22.5m in Mezzanine Equity financing through Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).

The controller-less Wi-Fi vendor hopes to exploit demand for its solutions through accelerating product development and increasing market leadership.

Aerohive says the move follows an increased demand for mobile devices which is driving enterprise Wi-Fi, with the market up 25% this year according to telecommunications market research firm Infonetics.

Led by IVP, Aerohive wants to build on their current annual sales growth of over 150% for the last two years.

“Since inception, Aerohive has worked hard to be the leader in controller-less Wi-Fi and cloud-enabled networking, and it brings great satisfaction to see high profile investors like Institutional Venture Partners endorse our vision,” says David Flynn, CEO of Aerohive Networks.

“We built solutions for where the market needed to go, and now the market is coming to us, leading to explosive sales growth.

“This is too exciting of an opportunity to not fully capitalize on, and this new investment lets us do just that.”

Founded in 2006, Aerohive has raised $72m in previous rounds of funding after almost tripling its customer base with over 5000 customers expecting to surpass an annualized sales run rate of $100m before 2013.

“The mobile enterprise is forcing businesses to re-evaluate their network infrastructures, making the market an attractive one for new solution providers like Aerohive,” says Steve Harrick, IVP general partner.

“At IVP, we carefully select who we back based on superior technology and go-to-market strategy.

“We chose to invest in Aerohive because the company delivers a proven, next-generation enterprise networking solution and has demonstrated strong business momentum and rapid growth.

“We are excited to be working together.”